Palin had a reflexive tendency to refer to Biden as “O’Biden,” says [Steve Schmidt, former chief campaign strategist for John McCain], something that had to be fixed before the debate. He says others in the campaign came up with a solution. “It was multiple people — and I wasn’t one of them– who all said at the same time, ‘Just say, Can I call you Joe,’ which she did.” Schmidt says he took over the prepping, simplified it, and says she “more than held her own” in the debate. But not without one “O’Biden” slip on national television.

In Politico, Mike Allen turned this anecdote and the release into a full story. And it got pickup elsewhere as well.

But it wasn’t exactly a scoop, or even as embarrassing to Palin as one might have thought.  In fact, as you can see in the image included below, Palin herself told the tale in her own book, “Going Rogue.”

Everyone wants to sell their book, and that’s understandable; but this particular tactic seems a little dishonest, and the people who’ve run with it as a big story since seem just a little lazy.

But Sarah Palin’s story is also peculiarly modern and culturally apt in another, more unsettling way. As the vice-presidential candidate, she showed, despite her postgame spin, little real knowledge of matters non-Alaskan, and at least for the span of the campaign, she didn’t seem bent on acquiring much more. Her current desire for visibility, the motives for which remain unclear, suits our age of reality television, this moment in American life when fame for fame’s sake is the ultimate goal. One might argue that Palin’s ambition, which some have branded simple narcissism, allowed her to forget her own unreadiness for the presidency and accept the nomination in the first place.

Yet in her interviews the past two days with Oprah and Barbara Walters, Palin seemed wiser and more seasoned than she was just one year ago. It wasn’t only that she looked older, the creases around her mouth having deepened, it was also that, no longer under the shadow of McCain and his handlers, she came off as natural, confident, good-humored and even, at times, articulate. Though her tendency to ramble persisted, she wasn’t as awkward and garbled as in the past. She was also disarmingly honest. “It was easy to understand why a woman would feel that it’s easier to just do away with some less-than-ideal circumstances, to do away with the problem,” she told Oprah, about the soul-searching she underwent on learning that Trig would be born with Down syndrome. And about that fateful interview with Katie Couric, she noted, “Of course, I’m thinking, ‘If you thought that was a good interview, I don’t know what a bad interview was.’” Watching her — though I may be nearly alone here — it was almost possible to buy the narrative that McCain’s advisors, in their contempt for her, genuinely threw her off her game and then, by silencing her, conveyed the sense she shouldn’t have tried to play at all. Or at least it was possible to understand why many Palin supporters believe this. It even seemed plausible that her risible cocktail of big words and folk sayings was an attempt to ape political rhetoric that she wasn’t trained in and found intimidating. Maybe, in an earnest, rushed attempt to jam together a highfalutin idiom, to sound like the politicians on TV rather than the one she happened to be, she scrambled her own persona.

After all, as the populist governor of a state whose voters respond to plainspoken directness, she suddenly found herself a national figure addressing big-media sophisticates. She was given about seven seconds to learn her role and then, after eight seconds, patronized and mocked. The reasons she performed so poorly are the very reasons her fan base loves her. If, over the next three years, her performance improves as much as it appears to have in just the last year, the conventional rap about her rustic idiocy may come off as mean-spirited and archaic. Her foes might be wise to contemplate the notion that someone of Palin’s background and sensibilities has a right, regardless of her views, to participate in the national debate merely because she speaks (though often unclearly) for many like her. If this possibility can’t be countenanced, then government for the people by the people is an abstract idea we’ve grown too cynical to practice. Sarah Palin endures not because she’s brilliant, smooth or philosophically correct, but because hope in democracy endures, too.

If I am giving Palin’s book a thumbs up, it is qualified by the fact that, let’s face it, the genre of the female political autobiography is itself in its infancy. It’s like some 53rd state, housing at this moment in time only a handful of crude, wooden, lean-to outposts. These are times when former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright can do a book tour based on her pins and brooches, about which “Morning Edition’s” Susan Stamberg will huskily midwife a most empathic and unironic discussion. These are times when Nancy Pelosi comes out with a memoir slender as a Hallmark card, a memoir no living person but me has apparently read, vaguely titled “Know Your Power: A Message to America’s Daughters,” which her publishers carefully deemed (“How shall we describe this?”) a “keepsake.” Then again, one understands why female political books tend toward focus group-approved mottos and tasteful brooches — women have not been in politics for very long and, even more than the men in this rabid age, if they dare utter an opinion or take a stand, they and, weirdly, also their children get media-raped and shredded. (One curious triangulation in Palin’s book is irritation with Obama’s and Biden’s relatively easy media rides coupled with unexpected sympathy for media-slogfested Hillary Clinton. Our bodies, ourselves! “Clinton-Palin in 2012!” Can you imagine? Neither can I.)

So what’s refreshing is that Palin seems unafraid to express herself, warts and all — informal campaign motto: “Heels on! Gloves off!” — and the book just goes where it goes. Much has already been made of her freewheeling critiques, not just of Democrats but also of Republican Party insiders and McCain 2008 campaign managers, particularly in the gloomy waning days of the run. (“Schmidt leveled his eyes at me. ‘We don’t have the money Obama does and the numbers don’t look good. We’ve got to change things up.’ I AGREE. I was eager to hear a new strategy. ‘So,’ he continued, ‘headquarters is flying in a nutritionist.’” Ba-dump-bump!) She is forthcoming enough about her personal failings. Belying her shellacked outer shell, more reminiscent to me of Anita Bryant than Tina Fey, Palin confesses a not-ready-for-prime-time horror at Trig’s Down syndrome diagnosis and relates at least one fairly satisfying campaign trail fight with husband Todd. As opposed to Bush’s post-Yale reinvention of himself as a Texas cowboy, Palin doesn’t seem to be making this folksy stuff up. And really, who would want to? While courting Palin as a teen, Todd gave her “gold nugget earrings”; with only one phone line in the house, she and Todd yapped at night on their back porches on fishing boat radios, until they realized every commercial trucker trundling through town could hear them; the wedding rings were each $35, the post-nuptial dinner was at Wendy’s. All this in the town of Wasilla, which, due to stratospheric sales of this particular product, Wal-Mart has deemed “the Duct Tape capital of the world.”

In Palin’s “Little House on the Tundra” (her own coinage), the very state of Alaska seems to have its own sound, its own language, its own quaint patois. There are so many more colorful sayings than that “pit bull with lipstick” quip! Things grow “faster than fireweed in July”; bench warming during sports games is known as “riding the pine.” Alaskan history itself seems to be rich, so very rich in … the letter K. “The year before Jack London arrived, Skookum Jim Mason and Dawson Charlie met up in the Yukon Territory east of the Alaska border with a gold miner who had been panning near the Klondike River,” reads one particularly chunky sentence. Decades later, that same territory might be crossed by a winning Iditarod dog team, whose members had endearing names like Hobo, Lippy and Fudge! There is the truly startling tale of their neighbor Doc. A private bush pilot, he was electrocuted and fell off a ladder while hand-draping fluorescent flagging over power lines so he could more safely land his Citabria at home. Never one to give up, after the accident Doc “retrained himself to be a left-handed, one-armed dentist”! Writes Palin of her huntin’ dad (who is known for palming balmy, just-removed moose eyeballs and warming fish eggs in his mouth), “So a lot of what Alaskans ate, we raised or hunted: moose, caribou, ptarmigan, and ducks. Dad and his friends became their own small-game taxidermists. Even today, my parents’ living room looks like a natural history museum. And when an earthquake hits, Dad can tell the magnitude by how fast the tail wags on the stuffed cougar.” As Frontier literature, I believe “Going Rogue” compares favorably to the Natty Bumpo stories of James Fenimore Cooper. And who wants to argue with me?

Indeed, by the end of this book, I thought, Never mind the hundreds of thousands of reasons the fiery Republican femme fatale is hated in, for instance, my oh-so-blue state of California. Honestly, a fair amount of what makes Sarah Palin weird is the very same stuff that makes Alaska weird. Covering one-fifth of continental North America (as Palin points out), Alaska is baffling. Alaska is ungraspable. Recall Jon Krakauer’s descriptions of Alaska in “Into the Wild.” On the one hand, a Palin quip about her favorite natural “organic protein” seems calculated to inflame PETA: “I love meat. I eat pork chops, thick bacon burgers, and the seared fatty edges of a medium-well-done steak. But I especially love moose and caribou. I always remind people from outside our state that there’s plenty of room for all Alaska’s animals — right next to the mashed potatoes.”

On the other hand, in Alaska it appears people really do eat what they hunt. They hunt in Alaska, they do: Wind chill drops to minus 60, there’s no main thruway to Juneau, wolves are predators, they kill moose and caribou, so hunters shoot them, half are Native Americans, people get their heads lopped off in snowmobile accidents, oil spills destroy fisheries, thousands of jobs depend on natural pipelines, stuffed cougar tails shake in giant earthquakes, there are halibut tacos, God knows.

So when Palin writes: “The spirit of Alaska is unique, combining awe for the untamed majesty of nature, a rugged individualism, and strong traditions of mutual aid,” what can you do but shrug and grudgingly concur? Sarah Palin is Alaska. She is Alaskan. (I almost bouncily want to write “AlasCan!”) As for the next chapter, look for new brooches, at least in 2012.